Unlock The CTV Opportunity: What The Future Looks Like

2022 is the year of CTV- A captive audience, and an engaging screen!

Advertising on Connected Television (CTV) is like an open invitation into a customer’s living room. A prime seat that cannot be missed. And here are the numbers to prove it!

eMarketer forecasts that CTV ad spend will reach $14.44 billion, up by 60% from 2020. It will more than double by 2025, soaring past $30 billion.

It is possible to unlock those advertising dollars by combining audience-based buying with the type of high-quality, engaging content that linear TV has historically been renowned for. Industry experts aim to focus more on identity, interactivity and engagement, growth of ad-supported video-on-demand(AVOD), and convergence of TV and online videos.

Interesting Read: Connected TV Explained: The Essential Glossary Of CTV

Measurement and Identification

Ad measurement is a challenge primarily from the fragmentation of the ecosystem. In other words, there’s no common currency.

Nielsen’s panel-based approach worked seamlessly within the linear TV but proved insufficient for a highly dynamic and addressable CTV ecosystem. The approach is not equipped to provide advertisers with the required insight into a campaign’s performance. This resulted in losing its Media Rating Council accreditation in September

The fundamental problem is the lack of a common identifier across the various CTV platforms. A universal, cross-platform identifier would simplify planning and analyzing CTV campaigns for media buyers. Therefore, alternative currencies are experimented with to measure deduplicated audiences across linear and CTV platforms.

CTV is using IP addresses heavily as its last non-consent-based identifier. However, IP addresses could be in for reckoning in 2022 thanks to the rising privacy regulations. So, industry players must continue trialing new ways to make the most of the audience data they have.

Meanwhile, there will be a rise in clean room technology. Data sharing in clean rooms is a safe, secure way for media companies and advertisers to share their first-party data for targeting and measuring purposes. The system will help TV advertisers go beyond basic demographics such as gender and age and make more advanced audience-based purchases.

Interesting Read: Clean Rooms Explained: How Marketers Can Prepare For Cookieless World

Interactivity and Engagement

This is the golden era for content. Another upcoming big shift in the landscape of CTV – Interactive Content

High-quality, creative and engaging content will be key to attracting committed viewers. CTV breathes new life into interactive programming and helps brands build a connection with consumers

Viewers that engage in interactive programming are more likely to respond to eCommerce advertising when watching TV content. Users who can interact with an ad through a quiz, ad selector, or even a simple catalog of brands often stay engaged for a longer period beyond the ad runtime.

Purchases of what users see on the screen will speed up. Advertisers must measure beyond impressions to gauge engagement in new ways and drive real-world purchases.

Having said that, watching TV doesn’t suffice – it depends on what you are watching and how engaged you are with its matter. That’ll determine the audience engagement with the ad break and the messages in the ad break.

Ecommerce marketers benefit from CTV channels because they drive action across the funnel. An ad on CTV often prompts people to search online for what they want after viewing it.

Interesting Read: All You Need To Know About Connected TV Advertising!

AVOD is Inevitable

Well, all premium video content does not have ads.

In 2021, however, subscription content tipped the scales in favor of ad-supported content. Millions of subscribers subscribed to streaming services very quickly, and the trend only accelerated during the 2020 pandemic.

The most popular option, until recently, was subscription video on demand. Despite this, trends in the market indicate that advertising-based VOD is growing at breakneck speed. This finding is backed up by a report from the IAB showing that 62% of viewers prefer free content with ads. One such company, Roku, revealed in its 2020 annual report that 14 million new accounts were opened using its ad-based model.

The numbers agree that subscription fatigue is setting in. TVision reported that the time spent on AVOD increased 9.3% from Q1 2021 to a 38% share for  Q3 2021. Meanwhile, subscription-based platform (SVOD) viewership decreased by 8.6%.

The penetration of AVOD services will also not slow down anytime soon, especially as more quality content is coming to those platforms – that’s the game-changer. It’s a virtuous cycle: More content means more viewership which leads to more advertising dollars. It’s highly that monetization will continue to gain popularity with AVOD’s capacity to bring together viewers, advertisers, and content creators.

2022 will see big shifts by new entrances into the market who will have better access to TV with more personalized targeting. However, this does not mean all doom and gloom for SVOD. In order to stay on top of the new normal – endless consumer choice – streaming platforms need to invest in and expand their content offering.

Is Convergence the Future?

Advertisers struggle to reach scale as viewership habits shifts from traditional linear television to the internet-enabled connected TV (CTV) or other video-on-demand(VOD) options. In spite of the fact that traditional linear TV still has mass appeal, and is an essential component in any media plan, advertisers can also pursue nuance, flexibility, and precision with CTV.

So, can convergence be the answer?

For linear campaigns, advertisers are turning to CTV for incremental reach. An advertiser’s incremental reach represents deduplicated audience across their linear and CTV ads. Ad agencies that couldn’t reach users with linear TV schedules are now reaching them through additional CTV buys. It’s possible to achieve incrementality because consumers desire choice and want to have all their options at hand.

In the era of big data, we know more than ever. There is an old chestnut that says, “if you know better, do better.” CTV provides unprecedented opportunities for strategic growth.

Interesting Read: A Look Ahead: Convergence Of Linear TV And Digital TV Advertising